Among social commentators, it has become fashionable to declare that “everything changed after Sept. 11.” But looking back over the two decades of our year-end Maclean’s surveys, it is apparent that the Canadian outlook and mindset were undergoing profound changes long before that memorable and terrible day. When we began our annual investigation of public opinion across the nation in 1984, Canadians were coming out of a recession with a renewed sense of confidence. They had weathered the storm of rising unemployment and inflation, and felt they learned some valuable lessons from that experience. Among them was an emerging belief that we could not continue to rely so much on government; doing so would lay ourselves open to the very vulnerabilities we were trying to avoid.

We recognized that the country was facing ongoing problems — economic, social, constitutional — but saw these largely as aberrations that could be resolved with effort. Our optimism was also grounded in realism. We believed that “simply doing the same things, better,” was not the way to go. With the Mulroney Conservatives freshly in power, new ideas, new approaches and new leadership were the order of the day. It was time for a change.
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It’s been said that nothing focuses the mind more than the sight of the gallows.

Peter MacKay and Stephen Harper had seen the same polls as Paul Martin. And while the projected results produced Liberal visions of an unprecedented landslide, the PC and Alliance Leaders looked into an abyss – and the abyss looked back.

The prospect of annihilation – of the PCs being reduced to an Atlantic, rural rump and the Alliance a Western, rural rump – more than anything else pushed aside all the past concerns that stood in the way of a unification of the right. At bottom, the merger of the PC and the Canadian was a triumph of survival over the divisions that caused the parties to separate and that kept them apart for the last 16 years.

But let us not be over cynical about what has been accomplished – and at what cost.
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By their own account, the life of a Canadian University Undergraduate is a pretty satisfying one.

Regardless of educational institution attended, students from across the country report that they are at least “somewhat” satisfied with their overall educational experience; they are giving passing grades to their professors and are reasonably confident that their lessons will eventually prepare them for the workforce.

That however is the view of University life from 35,000 feet.

When analyzing the full breadth of the over 24,000 responses we received to the Second installment of the University Report Card, you cannot but be struck at how dramatically different the student experience is from one school to the next.
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By now, we’ve been pretty much terrorized by the demographers’ prophesies of the coming apocalypse of an aging society. The health-care system will collapse under the weight of geriatric care. The actuarial basis of the Canada Pension Plan is threatened. Statistics Canada warns of manpower shortages within 15 years, when the tail end of the baby-boom bulge exits the labour force.

All these scenarios are possible, but that doesn’t necessarily mean they’re probable. Indeed, to accept such straight-line projections as inevitable or the forces of demography as immutable leads to a faulty assessment of the future and blinds us to alternative possibilities that may be more in keeping with the future we want.

Fortunately, history shows that society does not evolve in the linear fashion that demography may suggest. Based on population projections alone, our universities should have been wanting for students since the late 1980s, when the last of the big generation graduated. Instead, post-secondary institutions are bursting at the seams and only high-school grads with top grades are admitted to their school of choice. What happened? The value we, as a society, place on university education increased and participation rates skyrocketed, more than offsetting the declining numbers of eligible, university-aged students.

Even more than hindsight, common sense tells us the unidimensional perspective of demographic analysis alone provides an incomplete, often distorted picture of our future. To leap from predicting an aging population — which is indisputable — to the conclusion that society will be exactly as it is today except with more old people would be simplistic and illogical. Already, the baby boomers have transformed society in ways no demographer could have predicted 40 years ago.
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Ask Canadians about their priorities for government spending, and funding for the arts and culture will turn up near the bottom of their hit parade (it routinely wrestles for last place with foreign aid). Anyone intimately involved in the sector, however, knows that the response of the “average” citizen masks deep differences within the population on the deemed importance of public support for the arts and culture. While the wisdom of funding symphonies, book publishers, museums and their ilk may be lost on the masses, legions of cultural bureaucrats, mavens and volunteers seem to spend their days lobbying policy-makers on the need for more funds for the arts. In fact, while it is rarely in the forefront of public debate, there may well be no single issue that divides elites and the general public more than this question.

The arguments in support of cultural funding, however, are many, varied, rarely coherent and most often revolve around questions as to which constituency within the arts and cultural community is in most need of, or would benefit most from, this support. Rarely stated, but always implicit, is the premise that Canadian culture (at least at this point) is not economically or commercially viable. Not even whispered, however, is the underlying belief that the average Canadian is not sufficiently interested in any of these forms of cultural expression to pay — either through taxes or at the box office — for our creator community, cultural industries or the public institutions that exhibit and host cultural events.
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A SPEECH BY ALLAN R. GREGG TO THE CANADIAN CLUB – MAY 20, 2003; TORONTO, ONTARIO

We live in a time of moral relativism. Every idea, behaviour and habit carries a weight, worthy of equal consideration, and is supposed to be as acceptable as any other. Indeed, many consider this the hallmark of an enlightened, pluralistic, open-minded society.

When you look at our public opinion data however, there is one area where unequivocal judgementalism seems to be not only accepted, but the norm.

Today, regardless of socio-economic status or ideological perspective, the electorate appears to be uniformly disdainful of politicians, governments and state activity.
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No matter how often, and with what force, our public health officials assure us that we should not panic in the face of the SARS outbreak, their message is bound to fall on skeptical ears. That is because the basis for fear has little to do with rationality or reason, and instead appears embedded in deep cultural anxieties that have become a central part of the modern, Western world.

Of all the questions I have posed in polling throughout the years, perhaps my favourite is: “If someone told you something was safe and someone else told you it was unsafe, which one would you believe?” A very small minority (10 per cent) reported they would believe that this (undefined) something was safe, and 22 per cent had the common sense to declare that it would depend on who was doing the telling and what they were talking about. But the vast majority — fully 68 per cent — would accept the message of doom and gloom. That gives us a penetrating insight into the nature of fear and our reaction to the possibilities of exposure to risk.
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The accepted wisdom following the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks was that Canadians would forge a much closer bond with Americans. Out of the twin impulses of empathy and threat, we would see our common interests aligned and our destiny linked within the boundaries of our shared continent.

What a difference a year can make. Our 2002 year-end poll indicates that, far from drawing closer together, Canadians are expressing a growing desire to chart a distinct path, independent of our neighbours to the south. Over the past year, we have seen the number of Canadians who describe the United States as “family” or “best friends” shrink by a third — to only one in five — as the vast majority have come to characterize our relationship as either “friends, but not especially close” or “cordial but distant.”

Similarly, since we last asked this question in 1999, the percentage who believe we are “mainly” or “essentially” different from Americans has grown to a significant majority of 57 per cent.

We also see a solid sentiment that the United States is acting like a bully and a majority who fear that “we are losing our independence to the United States.” In policy terms, these underlying beliefs have created a population that is unconvinced that Iraq warrants attack; that has serious misgivings about supporting our allies in any assault on Saddam Hussein done outside the sanction of the United Nations; and that is unprepared to follow the U.S. lead in rejecting the Kyoto accord.
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When Gross Domestic Product goes up, the media and citizenry have been conditioned to shout hosannas. Yet in the backrooms somewhere, decision-makers could be looking at these same robust growth figures with concern, fearing the economy may be overheating and creating the conditions for higher inflation. At some point, if these signals become too alarming, central bankers will raise their interest rates and — presto! — your mortgage payment just went up. In this way, we use indicators of economic growth to generate a series of non-economic policies and outcomes.

Whether this is good economic policy or not has been debated for decades. What is rarely discussed outside academics circles, however, is whether these indicators of progress actually give us the right guidance to create the society we collectively want. The implications go far beyond mere economics or the arcana of economic measurement. Competing views of the world — each justified by how we measure progress — play a part in the real world of public policy and public choice.
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When the Strategic Counsel joined forces with UThink to use the Studentawards database to undertake the most comprehensive review ever conducted of Canadian University student’s attitudes to their educational experience, we assumed that we would find some significant differences (why, after all, set out to rank Universities, if this was not the starting premise?). Our assumption was that we would uncover great Universities, middling ones and some that failed to meet their constituent’s needs. In other words, we expected that the top-tiered Universities would be appreciated as such because they were beacons of excellence while the lower ranked Universities would do everything less well.

In some measure, this proved true. Students across the country rate their Universities in very different ways and are able to articulate their University experience in very precise ways.

But what was even more telling was that each of the 29 student body’s we interviewed had highly divergent and distinctive assessments of the school experience and as a result, every University in Canada appears to have their own divergent and distinctive personality.
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